The Marquis de Sade: For Virtue or Vice?

The Marquis de Sade is infamous for his personal and professional depravity. Although no legal charges were brought against him, he spent almost half his life in prison after a series of public scandals forced authorities to indefinitely detain him. His crimes — which made his name synonymous with ‘sadism’ — included blasphemy, rape, torture, kidnapping, and the drugging of five prostitutes with the aphrodisiac ‘Spanish fly’. During his incarceration, the Marquis wrote over a dozen books, ‘across a wide variety of genres, from novels, short stories, and plays to political, philosophical, and literary essays’.

Almost all of his work was a form of pornographic philosophy. According to Simone de Beauvoir, ‘it is neither as author nor as sexual pervert that Sade compels our attention: it is by virtue of the relationship which he created between these two aspects of himself’. In these two aspects, Georges Bataille writes that Sade combined two antithetical states, frenzy and consciousness, thus, ‘Sade was the first man to give a rational expression to those uncontrollable desires’. His most infamous work, 120 Days of Sodom, was ‘the first book to express the true fury which man holds within him and which he has to control and conceal, the book that can be said to dominate all books’. No one, he adds, can finish it ‘without feeling sick’ (just google ‘coprophagy’).